‘Good-morrow, my brave little master,’ answered the man, and bent over as if to signify his desire for a closer confidence (his voice, Brion noticed, had a queer high huskiness in it, like a rusty hinge with an intermittent squeak). ‘A word in your ear,’ says he, behind his hand, and in a forced whisper. ‘’Tis one Master Robert Angell that I seek. You’ll not know, perchance, where he inhabits?’ Brion smiled, and pointed up the bridle path. The stranger sat up, drawing back his shoulders and stiffening his neck, like one happily confirmed in a surmise. ‘Ha!’ said he, and stooped again. ‘I should like a word with him.’ ‘I’ll tell him,’ said the boy. ‘I live there myself, you know.’ The stranger was amazed and gratified. ‘Who,’ he said, ‘would have laid on such a leap-frog chance now! I take a back at random, and lo, ’tis a back-friend!’ All the time he spoke his spots of pupils never ceased to probe the face beneath him. He observed its eyes--to which the sight of lethal weapons were as yet little familiar--fix themselves curiously on his sword. ‘Ah!’ he said; ‘you are there, are you?’ and slapped the hilt with his gauntleted hand. ‘Mayst have as good a friend thyself one day, little master.’ ‘I will have a rapier,’ said Brion, ‘and a baselard with a sheath of red to hang at my waist.’ ‘And so thou shalt, by token of thy gentility,’ cried the stranger. ‘Of scarlet cuirbouilli shall it be, and on it a device of bears with rubies set for eyes.’ ‘How has your sword been a friend to you?’ asked Brion. ‘How!’ cried the other. ‘Why, as friends go--a champion at need, true as steel, quick to interpose between myself and danger.’ He whisked out the blade, so as to make it hiss. ‘Hearest?’ he demanded. ‘“What is toward?” it whispers--“some lurking knave, a damsel in distress, an insult to avenge? Slid! but I’ll answer for you and to the point.” It is a friend, I say; a watchdog with a tooth that it hath whetted on a twenty-score of rib-bones in its time. Mark you its edge.’ ‘It is a clean edge,’ said Brion. ‘From its newness it might have been bought yesterday.’ The stranger looked a trifle disconcerted. ‘Not so,’ he answered. ‘It is its temper--ha! I tell you, young master, it hath drunk blood like six-shilling beer, and knocked on more breast-bones----’ His voice went out of him with a chuckle. There at the gate, come unnoticed over the grass, stood the ex-Vicar, weak astonishment in his eyes. ‘Master Clerivault!’ quoth he. ‘What brings you here, and, out of your wont, by day?’ He had on a black cassock, but green with age; his shoes were tied with string; one flap of his bonnet stood up, the other down; his pale, mild head, like a calf’s, lay on his ruff as it were on an unwashed platter. Good Mrs Angell, the blowzed and ineffectual, would rebuke him for his untidiness, as she straightened her own tumbled coiffure, or appeared with her kirtle on the wrong side before. It was that sort of thing which tickled little Brion hugely.